Interestology [in-trist-ol-uh-jee]​​(noun) : The study of all things interesting

After a long period of rumors, Intel’s Core i7-7700K, also known as “Kaby Lake” launched in August 2016. They were worth the long-drawn wait. Moving forward, these are the processors that will power your devices in 2017. They are only an evolutionary step forward, so your expectations should probably only be realistic in nature.​Kaby Lake, the 7th Gen CPUs are faster than the 6th Gen CPUs, but they are just an evolutionary step forward. Kaby Lake isn’t just about the CPU, though. This generation reimagines what the CPU should be like.

The 7th gen CPUs have not only brought DDR4 memory to the mainstream, but also have improved overclocking features, better integrated graphics performance, and an entirely new chipset.

Kaby Lake is the first CPU produced under Intel’s new plan. The plan started with a “tock”—a CPU shrink (22nm Haswell to 14nm Broadwell), then a “tick” of efficiency improvement (14nm Broadwell to 14nm Skylake). Intel wasn’t ready to produce another tock yet, though. Instead we got a second tick, an “optimized” 14nm Kaby Lake. The question is whether there really is much improvement from Skylake to Kaby Lake, or is Intel just stalling while it looks for a way to stretch Moore’s Law even further?

However, underneath all this technical jargon, what this means for you, the end user, is simple. These CPUs are more power efficient, and offer more performance compared to what you received under your previous generation CPUs. There has been a nearly 10-40% increase in the overall speeds among the new generations, and this is what you should expect from the 7th gen intel processors announced in 2016. For example, The 7th gen Kaby Lake Core i5 unit is surprisingly faster than the 6th-Gen Core i7 by a small margin, which indicates that the value of these chips are worth more than the previous generation.